Community journalism for Yachats, Ore.
Residents of Yachats are very involved in their community. But the demise of traditional media and news coverage has left a void of clear, contextual, unbiased news reporting to help people understand what is going on. This news site -- YachatsNews.com -- is an attempt to fill that void with news of local governments, events and larger trends affecting the Yachats community, the people who live here and the thousands who visit every year.
I am a lifelong Oregonian. I started my journalism career in 1970 while at Oregon State University. I went on to become a reporter at United Press International and the Albany Democrat-Herald. In 1980 I became editor of the Gresham Outlook; four years later I joined The Oregonian newspaper. Over the next 24 years I served in a variety of editing positions, including coordinating local news coverage as Metro editor. In 2007 I was the lead editor on the paper’s three-week coverage of the search for a California family missing in the mountains of southern Oregon that won a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news.
My wife’s parents were longtime Yachats residents; we have been coming here since 1975. We have owned property here for decades and started planning and building our permanent residence in 2016. We became full-time Yachatians in December 2017.